2 minutesBefore we move on to general trends in Automotive engineering; a quick look at the some automotive trends in Eastern Europe (mentioned the country and replace slide accordingly)…Explain Car production trendVW just opened a new manufacturing plant Refer to article in EE Times about More design validation is moving to Eastern EuropeR&amp;D centers have opened (BOSCH)Moreover, in a distribute world – integration of remote facilities into the process is an important topic…Both, Design validation and manufacturing are test intensive; To ensure the design will actually function the way it was intended to function &amp; to provide solid feedback to the actual design teams;to ensure great user experience and reduce the amount of “after-service” necessary to fix problems that could have discovered during the end-of-line test. TRANSITION: So let’s take a look at global Automotive Trends…

1974 Honda Civic CVCCIn 1970, the U.S. passed the Clean Air Act of 1970, which set the scene for emissions standards and emissions control equipment such as the catalytic converter. In Japan Soichiro Honda of Honda Motor Co. introduced the CVCC stratified-charge engine, which not only met the U.S. emission standards without a catalytic converter but also met the stringent Japanese emission standards. In 1975 Honda exported the Honda Civic CVCC 1500 to the U.S. The four-door vehicle had a wheelbase of 2280 mm (90 in) with a front track of 1300 mm (51 in) and rear track of 1280 mm (50 in). It had a curb weight of 730 kg (1610 lb). The engine was an inline four cylinder mounted transversely with a 15° incline forward. The 1.5-L engine had a bore of 74 mm (2.91 in), stroke of 86.6 m (3.41 in), and a compression ratio of 8.1:1. Five main bearings supported the one-piece forged crankshaft. A single belt drove the overhead camshaft that operated three valves per cylinder. In the stratified-charge engine there was a tiny auxiliary chamber atop the main combustion chamber. Thus there is one valve for the auxiliary chamber and one for the intake and exhaust for a total of three valves per cylinder.Mechatronics is the new term that pulls it all together…now you don’t have to be good a mechanics which you have to understand how electronics interfaces with mechanics and guess what you’ll have to program something too.

How hard can this be?How complex can it be? Here is a very simple example, This example code is using 2 threads to access some shared memory. Firstly, its difficult to pick out where the two threads begin and end. You cannot quickly view what is happening in parallel as the text is itself sequential by nature.

And another application using the PXI parallel platform.Deep inside Eaton Corp. is a team of developers whose sole mission is to refine the test and measurement systems used in the company’s truck R&amp;D division. This case study explains how this team harnessed the performance of new multi-core Intel® processors and the multithreaded architecture of National Instruments LabVIEW* graphical programming software to more than quadruple the number of channels running through their systems and achieve real-time determinism.They got there using standard, off-the-shelf desktop systems, keeping power consumption, thermal output, and – most importantly – costs, down. The move to Intel’s multi-core processors also enabled Eaton to put their system in a mobile platform so that testing can be done in the vehicle instead of in dynamometers for more accurate, efficient performance feedback.

Unfortunately, in many companies the test process has not changed much. When the first version of the product is design one uses a traditional approach of building a prototype and making measurements…the late we find bugs in the design process the more expensive it is to fix them. You can only imagine what this means with products getting more and more complex and with the market pressure to design them faster and faster….The worst case is really when you have to do validation and design debugging on the manufacturing floor with manufacturing test equipment.

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CompactioRIO – Full Authority Engine Control<br />“In past projects, we spent at least two man-years and $500,000 to develop similar ECU prototyping systems from custom designed hardware. For this project, the equipment costs, including the motorcycle and CompactRIO, were $15,000. In addition, we spent about three man-months on this project.”<br /> – Carroll G. Dase, President of Drivven, Inc.<br />http://www.drivven.com/<br />